JR Elsewhere

Plans for English as an Official Taiwanese Language

Duties and a receptive mode (online and offline) are keeping me from blogging at the moment.

by-products

If I had blogged this month, one topic might have been about Taiwan’s (sensible, I believe) plans to make English their second official language. To survive under Chinese pressure, international perceptibility – i. e. communication – is a key issue for Taiwan.

There had been plans to make English official for some time, but they appear to have been taking shape this summer. Pan-blue leaningUnited Daily News (UDN) published an online article in March this year, quoting both people in favor and against the idea, including criticism by a Chengchi University professor:

Chengchi University professor Her One-Soon says that this, in ideological terms, is about surrender to Western power. “Currently, most of the countries of the world that have made English an official language have been colonized by Britain and America”, but has Taiwan? If [English] is really to become an official language, it only represents Taiwan’s inferiority complex towards its own language and culture.

If statistics of six years ago are something to go by, there may be more practical issues that would need to be solved. In November 2012, the English-language Taipei Times quoted a foreign education company’s study which said that proficiency in English was low.

One Comment to “Plans for English as an Official Taiwanese Language”

I think it’s a silly idea that will do nothing except reinforce some Chinese nationalists’ perceptions that Taiwan is a US colony. Taiwan’s international perceptibility will not be affected by its choice of official language, unless it moves to become an English-speaking country and stop speaking Chinese, but that is obviously uncalled for.

If it really wants to highlight its separate identity, it should make Taiwanese and Mandarin separate official languages, instead of sticking to the fiction that they are all the same language because they are written in characters.